Washington (CNN) -- Official documents, correspondence and other papers from the period of time Chuck Hagel held his U.S. Senate seat are closed to public viewing by the archives entrusted to hold them.

Last week, Alana Goodman of the Washington Free Beacondiscovered a contemporaneous account of a 2007 speech Chuck Hagel gave at Rutgers University. The account, from Hagel supporter George Ajjan, was posted on Ajjan’s website the day after the speech. During the Q&A segment of his appearance, Hagel argued the U.S. State Department had become an adjunct of the Israeli government.

"I think we've tilted very much to the Israeli side."

Chuck Hagel, Barack Obama's defense secretary nominee and a former Nebraska senator, said in a 2008 interview that he agreed that the United States has not been a "fair or credible peace broker" in the Middle East, specifically with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Only Chuck Hagel can grant access.

Omaha, NebraskaThe largest known Chuck Hagel archive is located here, at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. But good luck accessing it: Despite intense national focus on the defense secretary nominee’s record, this reporter was shunned from taking a look inside the trove of Hagel’s videos, audio recordings, documents, pictures, and artifacts.

At a 2010 appearance at Rutgers University, former Nebraska senator and current defense secretary nominee Chuck Hagel reportedly said that the state of Israel risks "becoming an apartheid state if it didn't allow the Palestinians to form a state." Hagel also referred to current Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a "radical." Alana Goodman at the Washington Free Beacon reports: